Cervical Cancer Monitoring Completed with FDG-PET
The Journal of the American Medical Association recently included an article that detailed benefits of positron emission tomography (PET) scanning to monitor patients who treated for cervical cancer.
A research team from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis evaluated the use of PET scans in a cohort of patients who had been treated for cervical cancer. Patients were recruited from a period extending over three and a half years. 92 patients with cervical cancer were treated with brachytherapy, external irradiation, and concurrent chemotherapy.
Patients underwent scanning with FDG-PET three months after primary treatment to assess disease status, determining if additional treatment was required or if the patients were cured of disease, as well as to correlate findings with FDG-PET with long-term survival and cause-specific survival.
PET is useful in this context because of the limitations of other imaging modalities and both clinical and histopathologic examination. Pelvic exams generally cannot detect the presence of small tumors. Pap smears can be misleading secondary to tissue changes resulting from exposure to radiation. Both CT and MRI scans do not provide adequate information to differentiate between tumor and healthy tissue. Blood tests, additionally, fail to provide any relevant information about disease.
Study findings indicate that FDG-PET scanning does detect tumors; cervical tumors glow brightly secondary to uptake of the radioactive tracer. Glucose is tagged with FDG-PET scans and emissions from the radioactively tagged blood sugar cells are visible on the scans. This approach is effective in that malignant tissue captures more glucose cells than healthy tissue.
This study is critical in that, according to the study authors, this research project validated use of FDG-PET to evaluate patients with cervical cancer following treatment. This is the first time that clinicians have a test that can reliably and effectively assess disease. Findings from this study indicate that FDG-PET imaging accurately determines response, allowing planning the appropriate next steps for the patient’s treatment.
November 27, 2007 Related topics: Imaging, Diagnostic, Obstetrics, Gynecology & Neonatology